Good morning everyone,
I thought I knew my way around tar for a few years now, but learned I'm
wrong about that yesterday evening:
I'm archiving a directory-structure, that does contain large redundant
files.
onepath/readme
onepath/binaryblob13
anotherpath/readme
anotherpath/binaryblob13
I cannot change the pathing, as this is to be fed to a packagemanager,
that requires it.
What I thought I could do, to not have an archive twice the size of
`binaryblob13`, was to use sym- or hardlinks and the `-h` flag for creation.
So archiving this:
onepath/
secondpath -> onepath/
using
tar --sort=name --owner=0 --group=0 --numeric-owner -chvf
normal_sized.tar secondpath onepath ${mtime})
That would work like a charm if said packagemanger would extract the
whole tarfile.
This is what it does though:
tar xf $tar_file secondpath/binaryblob13
And that works fine if I extract files from the directory first
referenced in the creation command (in the case above secondpath)
but returns an error for the latter directory I archived, as it tries to
create a hardlink on disk pointing to what would've been the former
extracted file. As it does not exist I've got a problem.
I'd like to avoid extracting all binaryblob13 references beforehand only
to have the link I extract point to something valid.
Is there a flag to tell tar "I dont care if you have to seacrh the
archive twice, but extract the original file instead of creating an
(invalid) hardlink"?
I realize thats unuseable for actual tape-records, but maybe someone has
a hint for me here.
Thanks in advance and have a nice morning,
Aiyion
